She risked a look at Connor, saw his eyes on her before they darted away. What would have happened between them had this night not gone the way it had. Would he have come to Jason Drake’s party? Would they have kissed?
He looked at her again, their eyes definitely meeting this time, but he looked away embarrassed.
“Is there an easier way around the crash site?” She hoped having something real to discuss would ameliorate the awkward connection they were creating in the front seat. “I don’t think driving near the plane is a good idea.”
He shook his head. “Maybe. Only way onto 134 is by the supermarket. I can maybe cut across the soccer fields and go wide of the plane, cut through the parking lot and back onto the road. Sort of how we came down from the fort.”
“If we go into the fields we’ll be sitting ducks,” Seth said. “Unless this thing has good traction on grass.”
“I’ll kill all the lights, stay away from the road, go real slow. Maybe we can get across it without being seen.”
“We’re almost on E,” Amanita said. “Do we want to waste the gas?”
“Going slow actually preserves the gas,” Nicole said. “Its burning time is exponentially linked to the car’s speed. The faster you go the quicker you burn through the gas, and vice versa. That’s why my mom always drives so slow.” She caught that familiar look in Amanita’s eye, the one that said thanks for making me look stupid, Brainiac. “Or we could go fast,” she continued, desperate as always to not be the smart one, “and just worry about it once we’re on the state road.”
Just then the orange gas light came on, catching everyone’s attention. Nicole thought there ought to be a laugh track accompanying it.
“Cars have reserve tanks, right? I mean they last like another ten miles or something?” Connor asked. At first he looked at Seth but the boy just shrugged, a silent acknowledgment that video game designers had not thought of that little detail in their racing games. Which left Nicole one again providing answers. “Typical SUV tanks can go near twenty miles once the reserve light is on. Maybe a few more on just fumes.”
He thinks I’m just brains. He doesn’t look at me the way the boys look at Am.
“Good enough. I’m going to get off this main road, try to stay hidden. I can hear those things somewhere up ahead.”
Nicole could, too. They all could.
Sunday, 12:23
The park’s fields were so black they looked like giant holes in the earth, pits descending into the Satan’s War Room. Perhaps this was where the creatures had come from, clawing their way up a rock-faced fissure in the Earth’s crust that opened when the plane impacted. Maybe more were still on their way?
Connor closed his eyes and let them readjust to reality. The dark pits were just grass, nothing more.
He killed the mud lights and dimmed the interior dash lights upon Nicole’s suggestion. She was acting weird, like she was afraid to talk. Still worried about her mom, he figured. They all were. They hadn’t run theirs over.
He drove the SUV into the dirt parking lot and then up over the small curb onto the nearest field. The low crunch of gravel became a shallow swish as the tires cut across the grass. He followed the edge out toward the second smaller field, this one for the pee wee players.
“Holy crap, look at that,” Amanita said.
Back beyond the parking lot, they could see the dark gray smoke of the crash climbing over the trees into the purple sky. A small fire still burned low to the ground. The emergency lights of several dozen abandoned police cruisers and fire trucks cut through the trees with intense purpose, a bright fireworks show for the new independence of the living dead.
“Lookout!” Nicole yelled.
Connor saw the creature crawling on the ground in front of them, like a giant black slug. He accelerated to run it over.
It yelled in challenge. “C’mon!”
Connor spun the wheel at the last second, realizing this was not a hisser. The SUV’s tires slid in the grass and the vehicle fishtailed to the right, narrowly missing the black form on the ground by inches.
“You heard him, right?” Nicole asked. “Not one of those things.”
“Yeah. He looks hurt. Maybe we can get him in the back. Do the seats fold down?”
“It could be a trick,” Seth offered. He was holding a large kitchen knife now. Next to him, Amanita wielded a meat cleaver. Jesus, they needed guns.
“How so?”
“Maybe those things can talk. Maybe they’ve known how to all along. Or maybe they’re learning. Think about it, we haven’t discussed the idea yet but we shouldn’t ignore the possibility.”
“He’s got a point.” Amanita picked at the cut on her forehead. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with him but it could be true.”
Connor looked back out the windshield at the form on the ground, now ten yards away. The man’s faint moans were audible over the SUV’s running engine. “Take a picture, why don’t ya.” This was followed by a dramatic and loud moan, like a man who wants attention in an ER. But in this case Connor knew it had to be true. There was no denying what they’d witnessed so far.
“Okay, we all go,” he said. “Seth, you and Amanita flank him on the left, Nicole and I will take him on the right. If he makes one funny move we bash him and get back in the car. I’ll leave it running just in case.”
“Leave the door open, too,” Seth added.
All four teens stepped out of the SUV, each one brandishing a homemade weapon. Seth and Am still carrying their cutlery, Connor now carrying a table leg, and Nicole a short metal pipe that had once been part of a broken heating vent in her living room.
They strode forward with arms raised, each one poised to strike at the slightest nefarious motion.
“What you gonna do,” the slithering man said as he rolled over on his back and revealed a chest wound large enough to put a fist in. “Break my bones? You see these legs, I’m not gonna run anywhere, least of all at you. You see this arm? Limp like a whiskey drinker’s dick. And in case you didn’t notice the hole here… Put down those fucking things and c’mere. Hurry.”
Sunday, 12:25
Lieutenant General Winston W. Davis did not fear much of anything in life, least of all death. He had served in The Gulf War, fought insurgents in Somalia, had taken two AK47 rounds in the calf in Bosnia—both passing straight through the muscle, thank God—and led four strategic raids on arms caches of known Al-Qaeda supporters in Iraq during the first of his two tours in that sand pit of hell.
In every engagement he’d killed a man, watched as pure shock and terror twisted their faces just before his bullets enter their hearts. He learned a lesson not taught in any manuals or training exercises, but in the field—you overcome death by becoming it.
The powers that be had taken him out of action in 2003, against his request, and stuck him back in the real world where his wife now proudly showed off her cell phone skills by calling him every hour on the hour. After twenty five years of marriage he still loved her, but not unlike the way he loved a perfect crease in his slacks. You admired it for a second, touched it for good measure, and then moved on with your day. There was no need to tell it where you were having lunch.
In the stack of notes he’d been keeping since his training at Paris Island, his memoirs as it were, there was but one mention of ever succumbing to the ultimate fear of death.
In Bosnia, along the Drina River on a routine information collection run which put him in charge of seven young men, a bullet came out of the woods and hit the young boy from Indiana they called Swig, coring a hole through the middle of his neck. The boy fell immediately to the ground, pleading for Winston to save him, but there was no hope and even the boy knew this. Winston ordered his men into the woods to find the gunman, himself following behind six adrenaline-charged marines that snuck from skinny, bare tree to skinny, bare tree. Dead leaves crunched underfoot, his breath steamed in front of him, he could smell the fuzzy, gray moss growing on the weathered
tree trunks surrounding him. Visibility through the frosted pines and barren fruit trees was still good as the pink sun fell behind the hill they maneuvered up, ushering in the cold Bosnian night.
He would never recall exactly how he strayed too far from his men for those few seconds. Perhaps they were too intent on attacking their aggressors and sprinted forward, forgetting about maintaining a line of sight. He was suddenly all alone.
A man walked out from a nearby tree, dressed in rags. His beard was frosted like the pine needles of the trees. Some kind of broken bone jutted out from his neck, yet the skin looked to have grown back around it. His gaunt face looked at Winston curiously with solid, jet black eyes, and disappeared behind the next tree in his path. Winston trained his gun and waited for the man to appear on the other side of the trunk. It was only a foot in diameter. He should have showed on the next side almost immediately, before his shoulders even passed out of sight. But the man never returned. Like in those old cartoons where an elephant hides behind an umbrella. Winston ran to the trunk and swung his gun around. There was no one there. No one anywhere.
He looked at the frost on the ground, saw only his own footprints leading back toward the river, a sign of real physical properties, height and weight. A human trace. The man had left no footprints. Nothing.
He would have checked every tree for this potential assassin had he not been shaken to his very core by those jet black eyes. No whites, no pupils, as if something far more sinister was moving about the woods wearing the skin of a slain farmer. Winston Davis did not believe in ghosts or demons, but he knew that a real man would have shot him, would have circled back around and killed his troop. What he had seen was not a man. He sat on the cold forest floor and shook.
Winston never spoke of this, and sometimes still saw those black orbs staring at him in those dead woods while he slept. He’d written down the events of that night merely to get it out of his head, and never read the journal entry again. Better to chalk it all up to fatigue.
As Lieutenant General Winston Davis lay on the grass in some field in some puny Midwest town, his lower extremities jagged from a myriad bone fractures, his lungs exposed to the open night air, he realized he’d now seen something worse than that entity in the woods surrounding the Drina River. In the last few hours he had seen beings that should not exist, a virus of killing machines spreading faster than any biology should allow. He had come to see the end of the world.
And what really bit his ass was that he knew he was part of the problem. He’d said his Hail Marys already for what good it would do him in the afterlife. Part of him was fine with this turn of events, don’t get him wrong. Something like this was bound to happen sometime, and if it was written on the wind then who was he to interfere. He was just a pawn in the end.
But the other half, well, the other half was just tired and finally realizing he couldn’t win them all. Now it was a matter of how he would go out, not when.
When he’d seen the SUV coming at him he knew this was his chance to have his last wish granted. Of course, he hadn’t expected punk kids with kitchen utensils to come out like some new age Lord of the Flies.
They couldn’t be more than, what, fifteen? Hell, they didn’t even look old enough to drive let alone fight anything other than their own teddy bears. He’d served with young men in battle but they were at least trained with weapons, at least muscular, at least primed to kill, and they definitely knew when to obey orders they might not find morally sound. These idiots looked like they still pissed in their pants every night in bed. Thanks, God. Way to go.
“…c’mere. Hurry.”
Sunday, 12:26
Connor took a knee near the wounded man. It was true what he said, his legs were shattered and Connor could see the man’s ribs poking through the hole in his chest. He had no idea how the man was still alive.
“Sorry, we didn’t see you on the ground. I didn’t hit you did I?”
“You came close, but no.”
“We can put you in the car but I don’t know if the hospital is still there or not.”
“Forget the hospital,” the man said. “Hospital isn’t going to cure anything you see here. Besides, I think if I move anymore that’ll be it. Lights out for good. I need to talk to you.”
“Did those things get you? Why haven’t you changed?”
“Kid, if I was attacked by those things, I’d be ripping your throat out right now. I’ve been laying here for a while watching the far streets, watching those fucked-up people attack anyone in their path, timing how long it takes the victims to turn bad. Figure it’s an average of about seven seconds.”
“I know. My mother was bit in front of me.”
“Aw hell, my apologies, kid. Your first time in combat, I assume? Yeah, that can be rough. Tell you what I always told my troops: you think about it after you’re sitting on your enemy’s corpse.”
“If you weren’t bit, what happened?”
“I was on the fucking plane. Strapped in, gripping my knees—”
“You were on the plane!”
“You don’t interrupt a superior, son. Now let me talk. I was gripping my knees. At some point I was flying through the air with a hunk of metal in my torso. Figured the impact would have killed me. I mean, it sure should have. Must have been launched out of the fuselage somehow. Some damn lucky way that you always read about in the papers where people swear they have guardian angels. Landed here, crawled a few feet, decided that was far enough. Mostly realized that it hurts way too much to move. Good view of the stars in this town, where ever the hell I am.”
“Castor.”
“Boring name. You got strip clubs?”
Connor wasn’t sure. If they did he had never seen them. “I don’t think so. I’m only fourteen.”
“Well shit, that’s a shame. Every good town needs a strip club. It’s American like Coca Cola and Jay Leno and Marlboro cigarettes. Wife made me quit smoking ages ago, but now that I lay here… Wait, this ain’t some Mormon area or anything, is it?”
“No. Pretty much your average town, I guess.”
“Without a strip club? We call that below average. Look—” the man coughed and blood bubbled out over his chin “—what’s your name, private?”
“Connor.”
“Okay, Connor, I’m Lieutenant General Winston W. Davis of the Special Projects Division, USMC. I’ve got a request for you. It isn’t hard and considering the predicament we’re all in you’d best take it to heart anyway because it’s a good skill to have.”
“OK. What?”
“I want you to kill me.”
“What?!”
Nicole took a step closer to the man. “Sir, we can’t kill you. Isn’t there anything else we can do? We can try to find help, take you with us maybe—”
“Now listen here, you jackasses, I will not be turned into one of those things and I’ve been waiting patiently for death but God seems to have other plans for me. So fucking kill me already and spare me this other fate. I’d do it for you!”
As much as Connor understood the man’s willingness to die rather than become one of those monsters, and as much as he realized he and his friends had been exposed outside the SUV for a good minute now, there was something else bugging him. “If you were on the plane, then you know what this is all about.”
“Hey yeah, that’s true,” Amanita said. “What the fuck was on that plane?”
General Davis coughed up more blood. “Stupid kids. What, you think you can understand what was on that plane? Hell, I don’t even know what it was. But fuck if it wasn’t the perfect new weapon, right. I mean, just look around. Took out this town in a couple of hours.”
“You made the people like this?” Seth asked. All four teens were squatting near the Lieutenant General now. “Why?”
“Shit, son, I didn’t make anything. And if you think the United States Marine Corps is dumb enough to engineer something this uncontrollable you’re as stupid as you look.”
Connor h
ad had enough of this man’s attitude. Authority or not he wanted to know what was going on. Besides, right now authority was granted to whomever could outrun the hissers. “Didn’t you hear me say my parents were killed, you sonofabitch? What was on the plane?”
“Slinging insults, now, kid? Good for you. Make you a deal. I tell you, you kill me. Sound good?”
“I might kill you anyway. My mind is starting to drift that way. What was on the plane?”
“That’s it. Get tough.” The wounded man chuckled, looked up at the stars. There was a pause. Then: “You know, when we first went to Iraq they told us we’d be welcomed as saviors. Like we’d get big bear hugs everywhere we went. Yeah, some places that happened. In others, they wanted us dead. In even other places, they just didn’t know. And neither did we. There’s the rub. You’re in some foreign town, little kids are smiling at you, old men are glaring at you, and in your gut you know something is wrong, you know you could walk around the next corner and take a round to the face. See, with that enemy, it’s rarely a guy with a gun. Nah, it’s a landmine, or bombs, or some fucked up trap that goes boom and the next thing you know you’re picking up your own arm or leg in a daze and trying too damn hard to reattach it but it won’t go back. The looks on those poor soldiers’ faces when they realize they won’t play ball with their kids, won’t ride a bike again, won’t even walk…
“So we got tired of it, said lets come up with a way to combat those effects. The powers that be say we can’t play God but you tell that to the good boys doing their best to kick Al-Qaeda’s butt, who just happen to have the bad luck to walk by a suicide bomber and see their own body parts flying through the air. They get a free ride home, sure, but they still have to look in the mirror everyday and feel that phantom limb where there’s nothing but empty space now.”
Hissers Page 15
